"Can you accept your desires graciously? When you sit on the cushion
and see one desire after another and feel how consuming each is—
if you
remain on your cushion, then you are graciously accepting them.
It may
not feel gracious on the inside. But when the bell rings and the desire
suddenly dissipates, we recognize how little it actually means to us.
Often it was just a temporary distraction from the pain or boredom
that
was coming up. Developing a gracious attitude toward our
obsessive
desires is what Zen practice is about.
Seeing the nature of desire is
the beginning of spiritual liberation."
~Tim Burkett,
Nothing Holy About It: The Zen of Being Just Who You Are
~)(~
Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from
man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
~)(~
noticing “existential restlessness”
Existential restlessness requires us to confront our yearning
to fill the void of waiting on God with all manner of stimulation:
intellectual insight, relationships, companionship,
or even the lower
pleasures of delicious food or an afternoon cappuccino.
The problem,
however, is that this wandering attention runs the
small self,
the egoic operating system. What is needed is to just sit,
and
to face the boredom and the “noon-day demons”
of attachment to thoughts
and emotions.
Centering Prayer helps a person to gain enough being present to be nothing.
This is liberation.
~)(~
~)(~
